


Crucible A.E

by mynameisradish



Category: Mass Effect, Pacific Rim (2013), Titan AE (2000)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-08-31
Updated: 2013-08-31
Packaged: 2017-12-25 05:08:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,048
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/948983
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mynameisradish/pseuds/mynameisradish
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>To counter the Drej and Kaiju threat, Spectre Kaidan Alenko joins forces with a dead Jaeger pilot who has a criminal past and the secret to the survival of the galaxy wrapped around his ring finger.  Mass Effect meets Pacific Rim meets Titan A.E.  All liberties taken to excess.  Science not peer-reviewed or board-approved.  Do not abandon all credulity, ye who enter here - you're going to need it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Crucible A.E

**Author's Note:**

> The idea for this occurred randomly to me at some ungodly hour as I lay computing pi for the Overlord instead of catching z's. It's very much a work-in-progress, but I have hope that I can mould it into something that is, at least, entertaining.
> 
> THE LEAST YOU NEED TO KNOW:
> 
> Kaiju: the hulking great beasties from Pacific Rim. They will herein replace the Reapers.
> 
> Jaeger: the hulking great robots they built to fight the hulking great beasties from Pacific Rim. They're not replacing anything, they're just being huge and awesome.
> 
> PPE: Personal protective equipment, common sense you can wear.
> 
> Drej: the electricity-based synthetic antagonists from Titan A.E. They will herein replace the Geth, just because.
> 
> Dark energy: the ultra-mystical stuff from which mass effect fields are made.
> 
> Element Zero/Eezo: Atomic number 0, symbol Ez. Element Zero exerts dark energy when exposed to electrical currents, generating mass effect fields that can be used to manipulate the mass of objects within range. Mass can be increased or decreased depending on whether the current is positive or negative in charge.
> 
> Biotics: The inherent ability of some beings to generate and manipulate mass effect fields; works by using electrical currents generated by the brain to stimulate eezo nodes in the body, thereby releasing dark energy. Eezo nodes develop due to element zero exposure, usually in-utero.
> 
> Switch from past- to present-tense towards end of main text is intentional.
> 
> MAJOR SPOILERS FROM EVERYTHING. PROCEED WITH CAUTION AND FOREKNOWLEDGE!

***

At first, the Kaiju were small. Not huggably small - and even if they had been, they were a brand of ugly more likely to earn a kick than an embrace - but they were manageable. Just another galactic vagary, no match for military ordnance.

No big deal.

They first showed up in the Terminus Systems, preceeded by short bursts of dark energy equivalent to the backwash from relay usage, which didn't register as anything surprising. They seemed to be attracted to human colonies. The first Cat-1 touched down on Gardor in 2173, and limited Alliance involvement in the area meant it went unchallenged until the Sirta Foundation research outpost raised the alarm. Colonist attempts to repel the creature failed; by the time Alliance forces arrived, Gardor was a goner.

Nonetheless, they put the Kaiju down. Sirta rode in to claim the rapidly decomposing carcass. Primary exposure to Kaiju tissue without adequate PPE turned out to be deadly; they lost six scientists before they realised that the expedited biodegradation released toxic substances. The viscous, phosphorescently blue blood was found to contain large amounts of Element Zero. The biological function of it was comparable to human haemoglobin, but that discovery was small beans: when the implications for biotic advancements were realised, Sirta had a field-day.

***

Kaiju recovery protocols were developed. A small military detections base was set up in the colony ruins, mostly to mollify Alliance detractors; in the wider scheme of things, Gardor was an insignificant loss. No big deal, just like the Cat-1 Kaijus.

Kaidan Alenko, just privately, always thought it was a damn big deal. The Cat-1, codenamed 'Trespasser', was his first major military operation; he'd only joined the Alliance the year before. The victory felt small compared to the amount of destruction, the loss of an entire colony. But he was just a rookie, and no-one gave two shits about how a rookie felt.

***

After Trespasser, the Kaiju kept coming, and gods only knew from where. Batarian pirates began raids on Kaiju remains; a black-market in Kaiju-derived products popped up almost overnight and flourished like ammoniac skin fungi in a Volus pressure suit. Claims of a cure for the Krogan genophage turned out to be nothing more than snake-oil, though: by the time they were traced back to a Volus merchant by name of Pitne For, poor Pitne had already done business with the muzzle of a Krogan shotgun. By all reports, there wasn't much left. The pharmacological renaissance continued just fine without him.

Cat-1's gave way to Cat-2's: bigger, meaner, and no improvement in the looks department. Going toe-to-toe with the big fellas became routine, and when they started sniffing around Palaven and Thessia, they ceased to be dismissed as a purely human problem. The Council got involved under the pretext of protecting civilian interests, but really all they did was wind swathes of red-tape around everything, until the men and women embroiled in the actual encounters could hardly fart without Council say-so. Minor mountains of superfluous paperwork had to be moved just to receive approval to attack; no more pre-emptive strikes, no, a Kaiju had to demonstrably hostile before they could so much as poke it with a toothpick. Then the Council declared that current military strategy was neither time- nor cost-effective enough. They needed to come up with Kaiju-specific weaponry and methods of attack.

To be approved by the Council, of course.

***

To make matters worse, reports of Drej began to filter in from the outlying star systems. Drej, which hadn't been seen on this side of the Veil for centuries. Whether the synthetic scum were creeping back in because of opportunity raised by the Kaiju crisis, or because of direct involvement with it, was uncertain, and there wasn't time or resources enough to investigate. The Council was still blockading military operations with bureaucratic bullshit; no-one could come up with any new tech or strategy that appeased them. When STG representatives began showing up at Kaiju biocollection depots with warrants to sieze material, the salarian influence became clear.

And that was when Cerberus reared its anthrophilic head. They had the credits, they had the tech, and they had Shepard.

***

Who was Shepard?

***

No-one Kaidan was familiar with when the name first crossed his terminal, but the dossier was a doozy. He was listed on the Human Biotics Registry as an A-class Adept, the kind of ultra-biotic who had probably been a couple milligrams of in-utero eezo exposure away from terminal cancer. Full Adepts were rare; A-class was practically mythological. His psych profile seemed pretty damn mythological, too. Shepard was accused of precipitating the destruction of the Alpha Relay in the Viper Nebula, presumably in retalliation for the Batarian slaver attack on Mindoir that saw his parents killed. Apparently, he launched an asteroid at it, effectively wiping out the entirety of the star system and all the Batarians in it. It equalled mass murder in the hundreds of thousands.

Somehow Shepard had survived and, reasonably enough, ended up with his ass clapped in Purgatory - the prison ship, not the nightclub - slated to carry out a sentence spanning more years than Kaidan could have counted on the fingers and toes of the entire colonist population of Feros. Shepard would have been left there to rot, had not Cerberus taken an interest in him. At the behest of The Illusive Man and his extensive credit chit, Shepard - A-class Adept and mass-murderer extraordinaire - had strolled right out of the supermax wing and into the centre of Cerberus operations. It wasn't just him, either: The Illusive Man was recruiting as many human biotics as he could, and not being at all covert about it. The ads were up all around the Citadel. Kaidan might have been tempted, if not for the fact that Cerberus was a shady organisation with questionable motives (advancing the human cause was accompanied by a lot of human casualties when Cerberus was involved). Besides, swapping the Alliance for Cerberus would have been defecting, and Kaidan had too much integrity for that.

They had engineered something called a Jaeger. Jaeger, when Kaidan looked it up, led him to an article about predatory seabirds. He was pretty sure that Jaegar here had a less zoological application, but it took a while for better intel to come through. By then it was already redundant, because Jaegars were big news. Modelled after human biology, boasting a vanadium skeleton with an iridium alloy 'skin' and an eezo drive core operated by direct neural interface with two biotic pilots, Jaegars made Cerberus' better-known Atlas mech look like the toy of a toy of a toy. They were collosal, which made the fact they took the galaxy by surprise even more surprising. Alliance intel went haywire: the head honchos were shouting down the chain of command wanting to know how the Hell this had slipped past their feelers, the operatives were scrambling for missed data and bad decryptions. But there was nothing to be found - The Illusive Man had pulled a fast one, and Shepard, of genocidal infamy, was his premier pilot.

***

The Alliance decried the scheme; the Council wanted The Illusive Man hung, drawn, and quartered. But when the first Jaeger took down a Cat-2 with an ease that made the whole thing look choreographed - inciting radical suspicion in some quarters - opinions were quickly revised. The Council declared them the perfect solution. The Alliance resisted; the turians and asari began blueprinting Jaegers of their own. Predictably, the salarians had no interest in anything involving direct conflict, but were happy to advise.

***

More reports of Drej hit Alliance comm terminals, becoming increasingly short and frantic. Skirmishes were kicking up along the far edge of the Attican Traverse. The quarians called for help. None could be given.

***

When Cat-2 'Onibaba' set its sights on Eden Prime, Kaidan really wished the Alliance had been more flexible. Hackett was a hardcase with a pole as hard as palladium up his ass, though. Onibaba only came down after doing to Eden Prime what Trespasser had done to Gardor. Subsequent to this markedly more catastrophic loss, the Alliance opened up to the possibility of instating its own Jaeger program. Kaidan felt like it was too little, too late.

***

The Alliance Jaegars were built with nuclear cores, enabling any man or woman of sufficient mental durability to become a pilot. Kaidan put his name forward for candidacy, and was turned down due to concern over his antiquated L2 implant. They wrapped the rejection up in longwinded science talk, but fancy words didn't disguise the essential meaning: that they doubted his capacity to participate in a neural bridge, or 'handshake', because the thing that was plugged into his brain was faulty, and that made him faulty. They wouldn't even let him try. All his involvement in Kaiju combat meant nothing.

It was a real kick in the ass.

***

Shepard was a goddamn hero. His daring Jaegar exploits painted a shiny new lacquer of admiration over his checkered past, and no-one even knew what the man looked like. Stories about his doings began to blossom among awed civilians; they sounded completely far-fetched, but when you knew that this was the guy who had taken out the Alpha Relay with an asteroid, they seemed entirely believable.

***

After months of success, disaster.

Shepard, still just a faceless name with a whole lot of hero-worship tacked to it, was dead. Lost on Aeia after intercepting a distress signal from the MSV Hugo Gernsback, downed by codename: Knifehead.

Of course, Shepard didn't go down without a fight - Knifehead was just as deceased - but Kaidan doubted that the death of the largest Cat-3 Kaiju on record inspired the same outpouring of grief. Except perhaps from black-market operatives and salarian scientists, because there was no way anyone would be collecting even a single skinmite from that one: both Jaegar and Kaiju went down in Aiea's ocean, making recovery before total degradation impossible.

***

The Jaegers lost popularity following the demise of their poster boy. Cerberus withdrew. An Alliance recon squad recovered an abandoned eezo-core model, but there were no biotics either capable of or willing to drive it.

***

The Cat-3's are too big. The dark energy pulses that herald their arrival are large enough to cause minor seismic events on tectonic planets. Concern turns from offense to defense. The Council orders the decommissioning of all operational Jaegers, stating that the collateral damage has become too high to be worth it. They lose Earth to a rash of Kaiju attacks that take out Vancouver, London, and Rio de Janiero. Reports of similar circumstances come in from Palaven. Drej sightings pervade Alliance comm traffic.

The shit is really hitting the fan, and it feels like the best they can do is piss into the wind and hope the wind changes.

***

His prominence in collaborative Kaiju ops has been good for at least one thing: he's now Spectre Kaidan Alenko. It's a monumental title, but it rings a little hollow given that the entire galaxy seems to be looking down the barrel of a Drej invasion and mass-extinction event. Feels kind of like a cursory pat on the back for simple achievement, rather than a legitimate recognition of outstanding service - a little bit, 'Here, have an extra word to put on your gravestone'. Celebration doesn't extend further than a beer with Admiral Anderson; Kaidan prefers low-key anyway.

***

Udina has been frothing at the mouth about Kaidan's Spectre status for days, and keeps slyly hinting at favours. He gets elevated to Counsellor on Kaidan's official 'recommendation'. Kaidan does it more to shut his pompous, boot-licking ass up than anything, because there may not be much to be Counsellor of soon enough.

If there is, he may have doomed it by putting Udina in charge.

***

Kaidan's drinking coffee in the Spectre Office when the name of Shepard makes an appearance on his message terminal: it's in the subject tag of an email from Anderson. Wondering what relevance a star-system-obliterating ex-con who died a hero months ago has on current affairs, Kaidan opens it up. He nearly spits his coffee all over his fancy Spectre tech when he reads it.

Anderson has it on good authority that Shepard is alive, well, and laying low on Omega.

Anderson wants Kaidan to go fetch him.


End file.
